Putting a Racist Past in the Past

Civil rights activists and others convicted under laws that enforced racial discrimination would be eligible for a pardon from the state of Alabama under a bill working its way through the Legislature, the bill’s sponsor said Friday.

Rep. Thad McClammy said that his proposed “Rosa Parks Act” would serve the symbolic purpose of bestowing posthumous pardons on activists like Parks, whose 1955 arrest sparked the 381-day Montgomery bus boycott.

But McClammy, a Democrat, said the pardons also could help living veterans of the segregated South, who still may have trouble explaining away their arrests when applying for jobs or loans.

“If they do a background check, they say: ‘Oh my ... this person was arrested five times,’ ” McClammy said. “It follows you. What we’re saying is, not only should individuals be pardoned, but the record should be expunged. These were illegal laws.”

Some of the most famous arrests of the civil rights era occurred in Alabama in the 1950s and ‘60s. Parks was convicted of violating Montgomery’s municipal code for refusing to move to the back of a city bus. Dozens more were charged under anti-boycott and curfew statutes.

The early 1960s saw the arrests of “freedom riders” and protesters who engaged in civil disobedience at lunch counter sit-ins. In 1963, about 3,000 children were arrested in Birmingham for taking part in civil rights demonstrations. Horace Huntley of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute said many of those young people eventually were convicted. “Those [convictions] are still on the books, just as it was in Rosa Parks’ case,” said Huntley, director of the institute’s oral history project.

McClammy’s bill unanimously passed the Democratic-controlled Alabama House Judiciary Committee this week; House Minority Leader Mike Hubbard predicted that his fellow Republicans probably would support the measure.

“I guess it’s just never occurred to me that there’d be any opposition to it,” Hubbard said. “I’m 44 years old, and I’ve never been a part of any segregation or race problems or whatever.”

Alabama has struggled to emerge from the shadows of its racist past. In 2004, voters narrowly rejected a proposed constitutional amendment to strike language requiring separate schools for “white and colored” children. That wording is superseded by federal law.

However, if McClammy’s bill becomes law, it will be one of a number of recent steps taken by Alabamians toward reconciliation. In December, Montgomery’s predominantly white First Baptist Church kicked off an effort to bridge the gap between black and white churches to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the bus boycott. The church has held prayer vigils and meals with members of predominantly black churches. And the Montgomery library system has named its main branch for Juliette Hampton Morgan, a library research director in the 1950s who was an outspoken white opponent of segregation. Morgan reportedly committed suicide in 1957 after intense public ridicule and threats to the library system by racist whites.